Announcement of theme 22 – House

Most of us are spending a lot of time in it these days. Yet, as the current curfew has harshly reminded us, some don’t have one. Or at least their abode doesn’t match our social representations of a home. The notion of house (or maison) is rendered variously in different fields: home office (whether a head office or one’s actual home), retirement home, “Maison de la culture,” the House of God, Maison de Radio-Canada, the White House, the House that makes one go mad in Les Douze Travaux d’Astérix (The Twelve Tasks of Asterix). This month at Quarantined Museum, we invite you to revisit a familiar place. The house theme was inspired by two exhibitions currently on view at the Museum. As part of the exhibition Gazes in Dialogue, Nicolas Fleming recreates a smaller-scale copy of Maison Antoine-Lacombe, an historic building of the city’s near Saint-Charles-Borromée, in one of our galleries. Finding a house inside an exhibition hall foils our expectations and creates a mise en abyme. The public is invited to enter the installation, walk around, and—why not—imagine living in it. One can also feel the tension between inside and outside, public and private, in the construction of the work, whose visible materials are drywall (gypsum), plaster, and panels of particleboard. There is something both familiar and curious about encountering these materials, which are usually concealed, especially in a museum context.

View of the exhibition Gazes in Dialogue: Hébert, Laliberté, Suzor-Coté, and Fleming. The A.K. Prakash Collection of Historical Sculptures, A Gift to the Musée d’art de Joliette, Musée d’art de Joliette, 2020. Photo : Paul Litherland.

In his exhibition Somebody Nobody Was..., Kaska Dena artist Joseph Tisiga broaches the theme of home as a locus for the construction of identity and “self-mythology.” In the photographic series No Home in Scorched Earth, for instance, he asks: how do you sustain the feeling of being at home, a narrative of personal and collective identity, when your roots and their nurturing soil have been scorched?

Joseph Tisiga, view of the exhibition Somebody Nobody Was…, Musée d’art de Joliette, 2020. Photo : Paul Litherland. 👉 With this call for participation, we invite you to consider your home, actual and metaphorical. What work of art do you have, or would you like to have, in your house? In what work of art would you like to live? If you are telecommuting, how does (or doesn’t) this reality change your home life? Do you consider your living space a private sphere, or are you among those whose door is always open? What is your dream home? What do you do at home and nowhere else? What home chore do you detest the most? In what room of your house do you feel best? What object, smell, taste, gesture, or song makes you feel at home? This month on the blog: ➔ This month, Contemporary Art Curator Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre will speak to us about the ideas of home life and domestic work in the practice of Monique Régimbald-Zeiber. ➔ Nathalie Galego, Assistant Curator of Collections, will present the work of sculptor Yannick Pouliot. ➔ As always, the education department is preparing a “family special” activity—specially for you ➔ And several other surprises are coming up on the blog to celebrate Quarantined Museum’s first anniversary, including a second episode of the new podcast series Spécialiste en la matière, testimonials from participants, and meetings with artists! Stay tuned! This article was written by Charlotte Lalou Rousseau, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d'art de Joliette. HOW TO PARTICIPATE? Follow the indications to participate and get your art on this platform. The next deadline is Wednesday, March 31, 2021, at noon. The exhibition will be online on Thursday, April 8, 2021. CLICK HERE TO KNOW HOW TO PARTICIPATE